Blog P.I.

Earlier in the week Matthew Mosk, a political reporter for the Washington Post, posted to Post.com’s The Trail an arguably unhelpful and inarguably un-insightful post about the disparate fates of the best-known online fundraising apparatuses (apparati?) of Democrats and Republicans:

Democratic candidates for federal office have seen more than $25 million come through the web site ActBlue — some of which will eventually flow to the Democratic National Committee for use during the general election. Republicans, meanwhile, have seen just a tiny ripple of activity on the ABC PAC web site — $385 raised for the presidential candidates to date — which is supposed to be ActBlue’s direct competition.

Sure, at one time it was supposed to be. But as this blog and other blogs have pointed out, it’s never had the kind of support such that it should actually be spoken of in the same sentence. Not to mention that several journalists, including Mosk’s colleague Chris Cillizza, have (apparently ignorantly) misrepresented what ActBlue means to different Democratic candidates.

Mosk’s brief report is of a piece with this, not knowing or bothering to differentiate between the two websites. Is it fair to point out that Democrats are doing better with their independent online fundraising tools? Absolutely. Is it fair to compare ActBlue’s total fundraising figures over three cycles compared to ABC’s (admittedly underwhelming) year in existence? Not without explaining the situation, it’s not.

But it gets worse:

Now there is a new effort to change that. R. Rebecca Donatelli, a pioneer of Internet fundraising who help raise some of the nation’s first online dollars for John McCain in 2000, has revealed she and partner Michael Palmer are working on a new, and she hopes improved, version of ABC PAC to launch this fall. While she continues to work on behalf of McCain, she said she is optimistic the improvements to ABC PAC will help all of the Republican candidates. Given the numbers they are posting on the site right now, it would be tough to make things worse.

This “new effort,” as Mosk doesn’t adequately explain, is a second go at the same operation by the same person responsible for ABC’s ineffectiveness. Worse, though, Mosk is apparently unaware of other new ventures by GOP activists in the same space. Even before Mosk’s posting, there were two new efforts gearing up to do same thing:

• Big Red Tent, created by a couple of Austin GOP consultants, supported by RedState
• Slatecard, created by DC GOP “modern media” evangelist David All, still yet to launch

Both sites have yet to prove themselves, sure. But considering that Mr. Mosk was moved to write a post about ABC PAC, isn’t this worth an correction? Or better yet — another post?